Patients in surgery are physically tracked by armbands with radio frequency signals to save surgeons searching seven wards to find them.

"No hospital in New Zealand, to our knowledge, is doing that," Chandler said.

Where once it took half an hour of phoning around each ward and running between floors to discover the number of available beds, the figures are now updated in real time.

The system cost about $300,000 to set up, mostly in building work for the room. The hub saves the hospital an average $500,000 a year, but many benefits - such as patient safety - could not be counted in dollars, Chandler said.

Only Bay of Plenty and Middlemore hospitals used anything resembling the Hutt's tracking system, and health boards from Australia had visited to see the ops centre in action, hospital manager Peng Voon said.

As the data started to roll in, it was discovered some wards were "hiding" the fact they had spare beds because they did not have the staffing to cope with extra patients, she said.

Information was held separately by each ward, on paper rather than electronically, so nobody realised some wards were quiet while others were always frantic.